“The secret of Chartreuse has long been the despair of distillers, just as the natural blue of those who do not forget me has been the despair of painters,” reads an 1886 paper referring to a recent history of the company and order. Father Holleran spent five years overseeing the distillation process, ordering ingredients and planning his production programs. When he left the place, in 1990, he became the only living foreigner who knew the ancient formula of liqueur.
“She’s safe with me,” he said. “Strangely, they didn’t make me sign anything when I left.”
This trade secret is both a market blow and a potential catastrophe. “I have no idea what I’m selling,” a Chartreuse Diffusion president told the New Yorker in 1984. “I’m always very scared. Only three of the brothers know how to do it – no one else knows the recipe. And every morning they go to the distillery together. And I’m driving a very old car. And I drive it very badly. “
Beyond the two monks who protect him now, everyone else – Carthusian or not – involved in Chartreuse’s production knows only excerpts from the recipe.
Inside the Grande Chartreuse, skilled monks receive, measure and sort 130 unmarked plants and herbs in huge unmarked bags (or, by 2020, QR codes). Then, at the distillery, five non-Carthusian employees work with two monks in white clothes to soak, distill, mix and age the liquor. A computerized system also allows them to practically monitor the distillation at the monastery.
Throughout its five-week distillation process and through the years of aging that follow, those two monks are also the ones who taste the product and decide when it is ready to be bottled and sold. “I’m quality control,” said Emmanuel Delafon, the current CEO of Chartreuse Diffusion.
The order owns the distribution company almost exclusively and works with the company’s lay employees, who perform tasks too foreign to the hermetic vocation of the order.
“It is their product and we are at their disposal,” said Mr Delafon. “They need him to maintain their financial independence. They trust us to make the connection between monastic life and everything else. “